A tough case to the very end

The very air in the Redwood City courtroom is "dead," says a well-known Seattle observer who has been there to breathe it every day this week.

Does that mean America's most famous wife killer will be dead as well? And will we all feel better and safer when he is?

Neither Scott Peterson nor his numbing and seemingly pointless parade of distant friends and jocular or teary family members have made any connection whatsoever with the jury says name-brand Seattle defense attorney Anne Bremner. Zero, zip, not a flicker.

Alongside Court TV's well-pedigreed pro-death penalty pit bull, Nancy Grace, Bremner has sat watching the impassive if occasionally irritated jurors every day of the seemingly endless penalty phase now in its seventh day. Then she has climbed into the Court TV clubhouse just across the street to opine on TV about the outcome, including predicting that the sentencing shoe will finally fall tomorrow.

Bremner, the tall blond defense attorney who advocates for the accused, sits side by well-dressed side with victim crusader Grace, a tiny blonde whose physical stature is the only small thing about her.

On one thing they agree. It's obvious the jury hates Peterson. Some members deliberately turn away when friends who haven't seen Peterson since junior golf attempt to humanize him with silly, empty anecdotes in an effort to save his life.

We all dated someone like him once, Bremner says. Well, maybe not quite like the man capable of plotting the tides, buying a boat, murdering his pregnant wife and her 8-month-old fetus, and sinking her with concrete weights in a cold, cold California bay.

But someone who has no emotional connection except to himself.

No doubt about it, Scott Peterson is a scary cipher apparently unable or unwilling to empathize even with the woman and baby he supposedly loved most if they stood between him and the life of a born-again bachelor.

It's easy to despise him. Easier still to whet an appetite for vengeance by cataloging the vulnerability of his victims. "One question to raise is how much suffering was felt by Connor (the name selected for the unborn baby)?" Bremner asks.

The hard thing is to take a breath and ask ourselves if we'll still respect ourselves the morning after the state kills in our name. To ask ourselves if we can hate killing and still kill for retribution. To ask ourselves who we want to be.

As a student at Stanford University -- so near to the Court TV booth where she now sits -- Bremner says she was a liberal, an idealist, a Democrat and anti-death penalty. And as an attorney who has handled many murder cases, she has argued hard to save those accused of evil acts.

Still, in a previous incarnation as a prosecutor, she began an incremental immersion in what she calls "the dark side of life," starting as a bailiff right out of college working on the Wah Mee massacre case that shocked and bloodied Seattle's Chinatown.

And the deeper Bremner was immersed, the more convinced she was that sometimes -- in rare instances -- even a defense attorney can step down on the side of death by state.

It's a more tenuous stance than that of her Court TV cohort, who likens the death penalty to 18 years of appeals in a state-run bed-and-breakfast culminating -- just possibly -- in a painless intravenous nighty-night. That, rather than a moral wrestling match with the complexities of killing the killers, makes for hotter, better TV.

It's possible that Peterson is a sociopath who lacks a humanity gene. But the defense didn't make that argument, Bremner rightly points out.

And there is nothing in Peterson's profile -- no abuse or deprivation -- that might explain his disconnect from decency. "The words I kept writing down in my (courtroom) notes were, 'golfing, hunting, and fishing,' " Bremner said. "He had everything."

Because of his demographic profile -- white, privileged, good-looking with no "priors," -- it's only remotely possible Peterson will get death. Especially in California.

And even if he does, only 10 of the 629 convicts sentenced to die have been put to death since the reinstitution of the ultimate penalty in that state in 1977. Although, even without execution, it is possible that Peterson may be killed in jail.

But if the state -- fueled by the jury's hate -- does seek to take his life, "maybe it comes down to that old thing, retribution, as a legitimate part of punishment," Bremner says, "Although it's not something I easily embrace."

Along with a distinct minority of Americans -- only 29 percent of us -- it's not something I can get my arms around at all.